“This book tells what it means to be a woman when you are poor, when you are proud, and when you are a hillbilly.”First published in 1973, Skye Moody’s Hillbilly Women shares the stunning and raw oral histories of nineteen women in twentieth-century Southern Appalachia, from their day-to-day struggles for survival to the personal triumphs of their hardscrabble existence. They are wives, widows, and daughters of coal miners; factory hands, tobacco graders, cotton mill worke...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Gloria Steinem—writer, activist, organizer, and inspiring leader—shares a candid account of her life as a traveler, a listener, and a catalyst for change.“Like Steinem herself, [My Life on the Road] is thoughtful and astonishingly humble. It is also filled with a sense of the momentous while offering deeply personal insights into what shaped her.”—Oprah Daily (Ten Best Books of the Year)

A grippingly intimate and heart-breaking portrait of the walking wounded who make up the base of the Trump movement. Desperate and angry, these are the men and women of the vanishing industrial heartland and the depressed Appalachian coal country and the drug-running, no-man's land along the Southwestern borderlands. They have no illusions about the grandstanding billionaire and his glaring flaws. But they feel forgotten and screwed over by the political, corporate and media elites...and t...

The New York Times bestseller, these groundbreaking essays and poems about race—collected by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward and written by the most important voices of her generation—are “thoughtful, searing, and at times, hopeful. The Fire This Time is vivid proof that words are important, because of their power to both cleanse and to clarify” (USA TODAY).In this bestselling, widely lauded collection, Jesmyn Ward gathers our most...

The story of the mill people of Jacksonville, Alabama. The mill was here before the automobile, before the flying machine, and they served it even as it filled their lungs with lint and shortened their lives. In return, it let them live in stiff-necked dignity in the hills of their fathers. So, when death did come, no one had to ship their bodies home on a train. This is a mill story; not of bricks, steel, and cotton, but of the people who suffered it to live.

Three cheers for the red, white, and bloopers . . . A US treasury of gaffes, goofs, and weird White House trivia!If they advertised the job opening for President of the United States, the ad would be pretty short. The only basic requirements are to be a natural-born American citizen and at least thirty-five years old. Now you can learn about some of the successful applicants in this special "Chief Executive" edition of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader!...

Michael Graham has met the enemy, and they is us. Fifty years after the Greatest Generation fought and died on foreign soil to rescue democracy from fascism, the question facing America is Can we survive the Dumbest Generation? Can a nation of uniquely uninformed idiots living in a culture that celebrates stupidity possibly govern themselves? If the question sounds harsh, you havent read The Dumbest Generation or (author Michael Graham would argue) the Palm Beach Post. From the bumbling ba...

This “viscerally powerful . . . compilation of firsthand accounts of the Jim Crow era” won the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Carey McWilliams Award (Publisher’s Weekly, starred review).Based on interviews collected by the Behind the Veil Oral History Project at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies, this remarkable book presents for the first time the most extensive oral history ever compiled of African American life under segregation.

“An American classic.” —The New YorkerIn An Hour Before Daylight, Jimmy Carter, bestselling author of Living Faith and Sources of Strength, recreates his Depression-era boyhood on a Georgia farm before the civil rights movement forever changed it and the country.Carter writes about the powerful rhythms of countryside and community in a sharecropping economy, offering an unforgettable portrait of his fathe...

To most Americans, Mississippi is not a state but a scar, the place where segregation took its ugliest form and struck most savagely at its challengers. But to many Americans, Mississippi is also home. And it is this paradox, with all its overtones of history and heartache, that Anthony Walton—whose parents escaped Mississippi for the relative civility of the Midwest—explores in this resonant and disquieting work of travel writing, history, and memoir.Traveling from the Natchez Tra...

First published in 1970, Studs Terkel's bestselling Hard Times has been called “a huge anthem in praise of the American spirit” (Saturday Review) and “an invaluable record” (The New York Times). With his trademark grace and compassion, Terkel evokes a mosaic of memories from those who were richest to those who were destitute: politicians, businessmen, artists and writers, racketeers, speakeasy operators, strikers, impoverished farmers, people who were just kids, ...

Roaming the country by bus and train, on a budget and without any institutional support, Linh Dinh set out to document, in words and pictures, what life is like for people. From Los Angeles, Cheyenne, Portland, and New Orleans, to Jackson and Wolf Point--Linh walked miles and miles through unfamiliar neighborhoods, talking to whoever would talk to him: the homeless living in tent cities, the peddlers, the protestors, the public preachers, the prostitutes. With the uncompromising eye of a W...